ISRAEL - YOU GO FIRST

Egypt’s President Mubarak is on the way to speak with Barack Obama about how to achieve peace in the Middle East. He and his advisers and their fellow Arab leaders across the entire Arab world are all agreed that Israel is the one holding up the peace process by its “occupation,” its refusal to negotiate the status of Jerusalem, and by its refusal to allow the return of refugees from the 1948 war.

I suppose if I were an Arab and a Muslim and if I was indoctrinated to believe that Israel was a rogue state created to salve the world’s conscience for an unproven holocaust in which millions of Jews were killed by Nazis, and that pariah state was created on land stolen from its inhabitants of thousands of years who were chased out by an Israeli army supported and funded by the Western world, it would not be hard for me to believe that Israel should agree to take the first step toward peace by agreeing in advance of negotiations to commit suicide.

However, if I were a student of Middle East history without a connection to the conflict, I could reasonably conclude that Israel has survived a continuous onslaught of annihilation by its neighbors pre-dating its announcement of nationhood. I would also know that Israel is the only democracy of the twenty-odd oligarchic states that surround it. I would also know that the Arab states are poverty-stricken and that Israel has one of the highest Gross Domestic Products in the world that leads to an unrivaled jealousy by neighboring populations that live in poverty, ignorance, religious superstition, poor health, political impotence, and little hope to share in their rulers’ wealth.

So, naturally, having little to offer in the way of achieving peace and knowing that peace has little to offer their populations in the way of achieving modernity, the Arab rulers wisely are now attempting to entice the United States into helping wipe out the only functioning modern democratic state in the region that presently sets a bad example for their down-trodden populations mired in religious sectarian class conflict.

I believe the wait for Israel to go first in offering to settle the conflict by allowing itself to be sliced into pieces will not be a pleasant one for the Arabs sitting in the hot sun waiting patiently for this to happen. Israel will not go first.